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This December, the world watches as heads of state and government and military leaders gather at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Leaders’ Meeting in London.

With the commemoration of the Alliance’s 70th anniversary, this past year has served to honor NATO’s achievements. To round off this historic year, the NATO Leaders’ Meeting in December presents an important opportunity to jointly assess challenges and opportunities and highlight NATO’s enduring value as it adapts to a changing world.

Building on the success of NATO Engages Brussels 2018 and NATO Engages Washington, DC 2019, the Atlantic Council, GLOBSEC, King’s College London, the Munich Security Conference, and the Royal United Services Institute organised the official NATO outreach event the day before the Leaders’ Meeting in cooperation with NATO and the UK government.

The town hall-style scene-setting event in central London encourages a broader public conversation about the importance of NATO, adds new voices into the conversation about today’s changing world, and casts a look into NATO’s future.

Watch the entire event

Learn more about the London NATO Engages event

Additional NATO Engages resources

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Despite a litany of high-profile disagreements between allies over the last few weeks, the NATO Leaders’ Meeting in London on December 4 “ended on a very positive note,” with a “pretty substantial declaration and agenda for the future,” according to Alexander Vershbow. The meeting, Vershbow observed, “went in like a lion and out like a lamb.”

While international headlines have focused on high-profile disputes within the NATO alliance over a litany of issues including defense spending, trade, Syria, and Brexit, transatlantic leaders stressed on December 3 that these disagreements are dwarfed by the continued success of the seventy-year-old alliance.

When French President Emmanuel Macron warned of “the brain death of NATO” last month, it was widely seen as yet another damaging public rift for the Alliance. But NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had a clear message on December 3, one day before NATO leaders meet in London: actions speak louder than words.

Trudeau said that “NATO has survived for seventy years because we’ve always had frank, real conversations. There have been disagreements that we’ve worked through. There have been differences and prospective differences in priorities that have ended up with a more resilient, more flexible, more agile organization that has adapted to the times we’ve had.”

Solberg admitted that she doesn’t think “we will solve this by our defense part of NATO,” but stressed that NATO leaders can help spur greater action. “What we really have to do,” she said, “is [to] stop climate change [and] make sure that we invest now instead of having to invest a lot in the future to work on the damages. It is much less costly to prevent climate change than it will be to adapt to it – on all levels of our society.”

“Russia has shown with its actions that it is a serious security threat,” Estonian defense minister Jüri Luik said during a panel discussion on Baltic and Black sea security during the NATO engages event in London on December 3. “For Lithuania, [Russia] is the only external existential threat we have,” added Lithuanian defense minister Raimundas Karoblis.

After an introduction by Dr. Karin Von Hippel, director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, H.E. Andrzej Duda, president of Poland and H.E. Zoran Zaev and prime minister of the Republic of North Macedonia speak on a panel moderated by Stephen Sackur, presenter on BBC Hardtalk

Previewing the London NATO Summit

Edward Ferguson, minister counsellor for defense at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in the United States, said that the Alliance is setting an ambitious agenda for the summit “to show that NATO as a septuagenarian is as fit and virile as ever and to highlight the progress we have made in adapting NATO’s deterrence and defense since the 2014 Wales Summit.”

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NATO is the bedrock of transatlantic security, encompassing nearly thirty democracies across North America and Europe. Created to defend against the Soviet Union, the Alliance today protects member states against conventional attack, engages in peacekeeping and stabilization operations, and leads counterterrorism and piracy efforts. NATO works with partner countries around the world and continues to promise an “open door” for countries to become members if they fulfill the Alliance’s democratic and operational standards.

Past NATO Engages events

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